1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a broadband wireless communication system. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications in the broadband wireless communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a cellular communication system, a terminal typically communicates directly with a base station using radio resources managed by the base station. To communicate with each other, two terminals each need to establish a connection to the base station and to be assigned UpLink (UL) and DownLink (DL) radio resources from the base station. The base station forwards data received from one terminal through the corresponding connection to another terminal through a separate connection.
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is a communication scheme for use between two terminals. P2P enables the communications by establishing a direct connection between the two terminals. The two terminals directly transmit and receive signals. An example of a wireless communication system supporting P2P includes a Wireless world INitiative NEw Radio (WINNER) of the Wireless World Initiative (WWI).
A conventional frame structure of the WINNER system is shown in FIG. 1. The frame of the WINNER system is constituted as a super frame. One super frame includes a control signal region 110, a plurality of DL regions 120, a plurality of UL regions 130, and a P2P region 140. The P2P region 140 is a resource region allocated for the P2P communications between the terminals. Accordingly, the P2P region 140 is not used for the communications between the base station and the terminal. Thus, the terminals can conduct the P2P communications without the intervention of the base station.
However, as the resource region for the P2P communications is separately allocated, traffic resources used by the base station are reduced. This reduction degrades the performance of the cellular system. This is the reason why providers of cellular wireless communication systems avoid P2P communications using the separate resource region. Even when a provider supports P2P communications using the separate resource region, cellular communication fees are likely to increase to offset the loss of capacity resulting from P2P communications. Therefore, what is needed is a method for performing P2P communications by minimizing the loss of the radio resources used for cellular communications.